Will likely start with an orientation about the business unit you're in, then a series of one on one or panel interviews with different managers and teams. Lunch break, a tour maybe, and then some more interviews.

Be prepared for technical questions within the context of your resume and listed projects/experience. But be more prepared for behavioral and STAR type questions as these will probably be the bulk of what they ask.

The majority of AFRL UNP stuff is made using low cost hardware. Sometimes you'll have a rad hardened flight computer like a Tyvak, but often you'll just throw in a consumer grade computer (rpi, BBB). When I did UNP stuff this is what many cubesats did, but it was an acceptable design choice because of the LEO orbit and short mission duration.

I've always thought this was something limited to UNP design teams, but recently I had the opportunity to speak with engineers from other space companies. Turns out it's actually pretty common on short duration missions or technology demonstrators to do this.

Yup, like the other guy said. Situation, Task, Action, Resolution. Basically take a situation or task (hostile coworker, deadline or budget crunch), outline your actions to remedy the issue, and what was the eventual resolution.

Oh I don't mean to say it's a good way to assess a candidate, it's just how I've seen a lot of those big companies do it. Pretty much if your resume keyword matches the position duties, then you're in!

Most of the defense world (Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, etc) will stick to STAR and behavioral questions. Typically by the time you get an interview, they'll know whether or not you're suitable for a position from the weight of your experience. They're essentially just making sure you didn't completely BS your resume.

That being said, for more advanced positions you may get an interviewer who might specialize in your area of expertise and who might grill you a bit more on the technical front. But even then that should play to your strengths if you truly do know your stuff.

For a simple design in which your enqueue and dequeues are tied directly to clocks then you wouldn't encounter any unusual operation. Really all I'm saying is that for more complex designs in which the enqueues and dequeues don't occur at regular intervals then you may have to do a bit more legwork to figure out appropriate queue sizing.

For example, say your fifo is being loaded with packet traffic processed by an ethernet core. Ethernet traffic is inherently bursty and so you may not be able to queue up the fifo at deterministic intervals, at which point you may need to look at things like the distribution of packet arrival times. In the same vein let's take it further and say that the fifo dequeues data in order to send it over another non-deterministic bus (maybe something with arbitration). In this case you'll have to do some analysis to figure out the queue occupancy, which would then allow you to size the fifo appropriately. This scenario reflects one such application of the concept that your original question asked about.

Just as a bit of clarification, your queue time for an FPGA design would almost always be deterministic in the sense that the fifo doesn't really "have" any unknown processing delays in it that you wouldn't be able to handle. When I say servicing time, I really mean the speed at which you can dequeue.

Yeah that's more of a holdover from the queueing theory formulation. Independent clocks would really require you to dig a little deeper into determining the probability distribution of your enqueue and dequeuing actions. But if it's purely source and destination synchronous then its no big deal.

Imagine you have a curve A(t) representing the cumulative number of bits arrived. A similar curve D(t) exists for departing bits. If your FIFO has a deterministic servicing time then both curves are linear. The area between A(t) and D(t) is the average occupancy over time, which is just the area of a triangle for linear arrival rates and servicing times.

I had a really good diagram illustrating this but I don't know where it is lol

It's something you have to evaluate as the interview goes on. Typically you want to show that you're interested in the work being performed, so technical questions are always a good go to.

Example, they might be talking about a new distributed control system, maybe ask about their software architecture or what platforms they use.

I've found that a lot of interviewers will take you a lot more seriously if you ask hard questions (what's the worst thing about working here/what do you regret the most about taking this job), but again be careful here as you don't want to appear too aggressive. Just remember, you're gauging them as much as they're assessing you.

you'll probably have a series of one on one or panel interviews with each team that's considering hiring you. The questions will likely all be behavioral or STAR questions. This will be followed by lunch, and then a facility tour. Make sure to ask insightful questions.

Okay woah woah let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's possible to do a grad degrees and stay within the technical engineer ranks. I'd wager an advanced degree is usually used to boost a career rather than condemning someone to management :)